To Quote Myself

Back when I was smart, a time some still argue was never, I could occasionally come up with a good thought. The delivery of it was poor and slurred, spoken from lips on a face riddled with acne and blotches... but there were ideas in my mumbling. This one fact often led me to me being confused as intelligent. I had a feeling these thoughts and ideas had been said before (more eloquently and with brilliant prose) by more educated people, but freshly repeating greatness was enough for me to take a small measure of pride. I had come up with my thought just as the the more learned and wiser yokels had done years before me. I'd often spend hours coming up with an original idea and then try to destroy it by finding a more appropriately phrased version.

It was the most fun, self-defeating process outside of television.

I had a particular favorite I came up with. 'Those who can't think, quote.' I so was amused by it that it later went in as part of my email signature 'Those who can't think, quote. - Me'. Really, I still get a chuckle from that. What a pompous ass I am.

But this morning I found something that ripped the roof off my Hong-Kong knock-off idea factory. Not just a re-tooling of my long held belief that quoting is done by the dumb, but a version of it that mine seem like the piss-poor product of alcohol and desperation.

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

- Dorothy L. Sayers

If there was ever an emotional equivalent to stepping into a pair of soiled trousers, this was it.

Why Every Woman Falls In Love With Australia

Every woman who visits England’s original criminal dumping ground falls in love with this poorly formed land mass. Here’s four poorly founded reasons why it bugs me.

It’s halfway around the world but it’s basically the same place.

Remember that scene in ‘The Abyss’ where Ed Harris has to re-learn to breathe using liquid oxygen? That’s not like traveling to Australia. It’s not that new and scary and different. Traveling to a different country that mimics its social, economic, and political structure and basis them on the same principals as YOURS does not qualify as a change of pace. I compare a trip to Australia like ordering Mountain Dew after a few Pepsis.

Fuck, it’s not even that different. It’s basically the same thing. They’ve got a financially backed currency, they speak English, their pants go on one leg at a time… it’s not like they’ve got eyes on their palms and use basic principles of Math to speak.

Accents do not qualify a whole country as cute.

If it’s how the voice sounds and not what its saying, your standards are lower than mine. You’re really telling the guy can be ugly as hell AND a jerk, but with that accent you’d follow him wherever. I call you a liar. Google Martin Bryant.

When I question the experience I’m told “You have to go there to understand.”

No. No, I don’t. If you can’t succinctly word your argument - or compare it to something else - kindly shampoo my crotch. I’m not looking for rock hard logic, just name one or two unique things that interested you. I let my grandparents get away with telling me southern Canada is amazing because of geographic features. You know what southern Canada is? America’s hat.

Is it their use of the metric system? (Do they use the metric system?) ‘Hot’ accents do not make for worthy praise of a whole continent.

Your period throws off your perception of life.

Plug that menstruating and you might have time to see the truth about Australia – they were left to die hundreds of years ago but developed into colonies instead. If you weren’t so damn hormonal, you’d see that the whole place was meant as a death sentence for the worst of the English criminals. The descendants of them are no better, and I won’t listen to your crap that children don’t inherit their parent’s traits. Explain to me white people if I’m wrong.